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Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

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Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#371

Post by strogonoff »

froh wrote: post #238
twodave wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's literally a biblical parable about this (though sort of in reverse). I'll paraphrase it (it's from Matthew Ch 20): A man goes out in the morning to find workers for his vineyard, promising them each denarius for the day. Around lunch he goes to find more workers. During the afternoon, he goes to find even more workers. At the end of the day the man pays everyone, starting with those who arrived during the aft…

the parable leverages our feelings of injustice tickled by the very relatable narrative to carry one point home, the Heavens part. the other, secular reading, has a heavy taste of prosperity gospel, putting employers into God's boots to justify blatant injustice and better margins, fka profits. it is and remains unfair to offer different employees different wages for the same work. please don't use the gospel to just…

The exact situation is (intentionally or not) very obscure to outsiders. There’s a research paper[0] dedicated to the question of who actually owns Huawei. Its authors found that:

> The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.

> We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.

> Trade union members have no right to assets held by a trade union.

> What have been called “employee shares” in “Huawei” are in fact at most contractual interests in a profit-sharing scheme.

> Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.

> Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.

For what it’s worth, Huawei’s own legal chief described[1] it as a private company back in 2019.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3372669

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/huawei-asks-court-to-rule-us-ban-u...

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#372

Post by Broken_Hippo »

greggman3 wrote: post #147
jedberg wrote: post #17

When I worked at eBay, we had a bonus program based on company revenue. It was around 6% of your salary max and managers got around 25% max based on the same formula. For the first few years, you could count on getting a max bonus every quarter. To the point where most everyone who worked there had always gotten one. And the one quarter, we didn't get the max bonus. In fact, I don't think we got it all. People scream…

Honest question, what's a reasonable solution for a small company (since it's easier to do thought experiments on a small company). You're a business owner. You hire 3 people. You pay them salaries. That year the company does really well. You want to thank your employees. You're not going to just give them raises because there's no guarantee you'll do as well next year It sounds by Netflix logic you should just keep…

You can decide to give a bonus because your company did well, and tell folks it is probably a one-time bonus.

It is a bit difficult to then make this apply to Netflix, though: They are Huge at this point. If I remember correctly, they profit. They can probably safely give small raises, increasing overall financial security for workers. They can, however, still give employees a one-time bonus.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#373

Post by rorykoehler »

eecc wrote: post #333
kbenson wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not staying at a job past 5 unless I have a share of the company. Screw that. Every startup owner thinks they are unique and that’s why 90% of them fail. Not all companies are the same, and not all companies are startups. I'm back working at the same company which was my first job in tech. Not for the second time, not the third either, but the fourth time now. I was first hired there over 22 years ago in tech s…

> They don't expect me or my fellow employees to work past our normal hours [...]. Yet people do work a little later to finish stuff, or check in to make sure something they did earlier in the week isn't causing problems over the weekend. You know, managment will become accustomed to that. My first scuffle with US “work ethics” came when I spent a year in a fairly well-known company and yeah, everyone was enthusiasti…

I am management and I work at a company that is similar to the post you are replying to and I would never get used to it. If someone does get used to it they have serious value issues (same as if employees take bonuses for granted).

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#374

Post by alisonkisk »

rualca wrote: post #367
barry-cotter wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors. It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t. This is not a claim about what I wish was true, but about what actually seems to be true. The actual research on this is scarce to the point of non-existence. It may actuall…

> Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal. YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company. And the only reason unpaid overtime was the norm was that managers, specially skip-level management, did a piss-poor job establishing sane goals based on realistic tim…

Yes, many places are willing to have lower productivity in exchange for higher quality of life. The US has a different culture and has most economically dominant companies.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#375

Post by DoreenMichele »

watwut wrote: post #326
DoreenMichele wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He may have only been engaging in petty schadenfreude. Given that they stiffed him, they may have been chronically a day late and a dollar short and counting on people to make an exception "just this once" (every single time) because of some sob story or other. Telling them "no" instead of falling for their con job wouldn't be corruption. I'm not condoning corruption. But I do certainly find the story funny.

Being strict and enforcing rules with one company while being tolerant and forgiving with others is how real world corruption often works. And for that matter, how bias in general works. Or nepotism.

Absolutely. Please lead me not into temptation with regards to giving me yet one more reason to bitch about how much it sucks to be me with regards to sexism on HN.

But in this case real corruption would be a former employee of theirs regularly bending the rules for them. If no one else was chronically a day late and dollar short and expecting accommodation and understanding for it, telling them "no" and expecting them to actually comply with the rules is called professional ethics not corruption.

Lots of shitty people get away with their shit by counting on other people being "nice" and honorable no matter how badly they themselves behave. That's actual corruption and such people often want to argue that not going along with their garbage is somehow you doing something wrong when, in fact, going along with their expectation of special dispensation in the name of "niceness" is the bad thing.

Giggling at their crap biting them in the ass because someone is actually enforcing the rules for once instead of rewarding their manipulative BS is not corruption. It's schadenfreude.

People who are used to doing the right thing even when it pains them very much are not bad people for getting a small thrill out of karma being a bitch to chronic assholes who think the rules don't apply to them.

I don't know if this was an instance of corruption or not. Neither do you. The devil is in the details and neither of us knows all of the details.

But, no, "clearly and obviously corruption" is not true. There are other possible explanations.

Having dealt with asshole customers who wanted the moon when the rules explicitly forbade that, I can well imagine this was only schadenfreude and he didn't know how to clearly explain that when he told the anecdote years after the fact to a group of friends.

Do you really think "good government" means someone staying late and doing work off the clock because their jackass former employer is showing up again just as the place is being locked up? If they weren't routinely a minute too late, this wouldn't have cost them anything on the order of the amount of money they screwed him out of.

I don't think such accommodation would constitute good government. The fact that being held to the rules was a constant source of friction that cost them royally implicitly suggests they didn't play by the rules. It implicitly suggests they routinely and regularly were late and their paperwork was botched and they expected to simply get away with it.

Being screwed by them wrt the bonus money may have protected him from stupidly "being nice" to them and thereby ending up on legal charges for corruption. That is often a slippery slope where "just this once because we are friends" becomes "in for a penny, in for a pound" and you don't know how to back out of it without being burned.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#376

Post by [deleted] »

lixtra wrote: post #228
DoreenMichele wrote: post #209

I knew a guy who put his two weeks notice in just before the annual Christmas bonus came out. So they stiffed him on the bonus. They ended up paying for that in spades. This was in the planning field and he was moving from a private consulting firm to a government job. Government is where the real power is for this industry. If they were one minute late "Sorry, we are closed/you missed the deadline." If they had any…

> They ended up paying for that in spades. Assuming that guy behaved differently with other companies, shouldn’t we call it corruption? Edit: > This was in the planning field and he was moving from a private consulting firm to a government job . Some downvoters want explain? Seriously HN, you want this kind of government workers? I didn’t assume so. It was an interesting story to share.

[deleted]

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#377

Post by chakerb »

foobazzy wrote: post #353

At a certain multinational company that Anon(a close friend) is currently employed at had this way of distributing bonuses when the pandemic hit. Context: the company is chasing a $100mn y-o-y growth at this point. - All employees in the US offices get a hefty bonus for the profits they contributed to - All employees in the India office were to not receive bonuses/increments because we wanted to cut costs (not to for…

I can relate to each one of those points. It's awful to feel treated unequally even though you're doing the same work. Before this trend of remote work, usually the solution was to just migrate to a developed country.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#378

Post by gnfargbl »

Closi wrote: post #343
mofosyne wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be interesting if there is a roll of a dice each day that increases if you have too many accumulated working days. If you get hit, you are forced to take that day off.

Or alternatively just accumulate holiday days the way it works in the rest of the western world! In the U.K. the rule is you accumulate holiday but all employees MUST take all their holiday before the end of the financial year. Employers must give at least 5.6 weeks of holiday to each employee, however can give more (either as a fixed amount or unlimited amount). There are some rules that let you roll holiday over to…

As a small caveat, the 5.6 weeks (28 days) is allowed to include the eight statutory bank holidays, and almost always does (i.e. the worker can't insist that they not be paid for the bank holiday, and take the holiday day some other time). So the minimum amount of non-discretionary holiday that a worker can accrue is usually four weeks.

In practice the actual baseline offered in many jobs seems to be five weeks, plus bank holidays.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#379

Post by alisonkisk »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #320
jachee wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make it a flat guaranteed amount Isn't this functionally equivalent to "pay better base salaries"?

Indeed, but in many countries this is done via a 13th payment. To be honest I've never seen 13th payments offered in dev careers, so when I hear some of my Scrum friends demanding it I'm quite surprised since I know they make comparable amounts to me.

"13th payment" is the same as getting paid every two weeks (quite common), but concentrated onto one moment instead of evenly paced.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#380

Post by aniforprez »

kbenson wrote: post #337
aniforprez wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean "some people" is clearly not the person you're replying to and I agree with them. I'd much rather get paid for the work I do. Unless I have a stake in the company, the company is not my family and my work is a means to an end

> the company is not my family and my work is a means to an end That's fine. I wasn't making some argument that you should work for someone that's like family, just that there's a whole spectrum between "caring about my company stops at shift end" and "my identity is bound up in this place I work". I think most people would agree that money isn't the only thing most people care about when choosing a job. There's plen…

Fair enough yeah I do agree with the spectrum between "jaded employee" and "enthusiastic achiever"
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